New C64 Documentary – ‘The Commodore Story’

Director Steve Fletcher let us know about The Commodore Story, a planned documentary exploring the history and impact of the seminal personal computer manufacturer.

Here’s what he has to say about it:

The Commodore Story is a cram packed 2 hour documentary film that will take us through Commodore’s evolution from the 70’s to the 90’s from the PET, Vic20, C64 to the Amiga and beyond and include many game makers and composers from the 80’s and early 90’s.

We are going to publish The Commodore Story on Blu-ray and will also be creating a 50 page book featuring photos and interviews from the documentary.

The project is being funded as a Kickstarter project. The Blu-Ray disc is available to project backers for £25 (about US $31) and is expected to ship in Dec 2017.

It’s not a C64 documentary, it’s a Commodore documentary. To the mindless people who think this is crap, jog on then. As for the font it’s probably making a bold statement, maybe for its time around when most of the machines were getting released they were the godfather of the home computers vs the others at the time.

You must be young. Todays computers boot astonishingly fast compared to the old machines. Even disk drives which were very expensive at the time of the early 80s were slow, never mind loading stuff from tape. I don’t miss that at all.

These machines had great inventive and influential games and apps that’s why they are so fondly remembered. Not to undermine the great engineering that went into these computers, but of course time and technology marches forward and what was great yesterday is superceded by the next thing. And that’s exciting as hell!

You know what they say about assuming things, I used a C64 from between ca. 1983-1997. It “boots” to the OS (that’s the Basic prompt) in milliseconds. Loading software is another matter, but a fast loader cartridge helped a lot (Action Replay for me).

I liked how my windows machine boots up after being off and i am at main screen where i could start something
BUT
windows still takes about another 5 minutes loading all that tray junk and other stuff before i can really use it

The C64 was the beginning of my transformation from musician to musician/programmer. I taught myself assembly language on that thing (and wrote a simple algorithmic music program in assembly). I have fond memories, but will never go back. Arguments over boot time are silly; doesn’t everyone just use that time to get coffee?